Hmm, they pulled their advertizing from All American Muslim four years ago. Now, they fired some management for acquiescing to a bigot’s request.
No sure if it’s because upper management has smartened up or…
/Yeah, I know, the article isn’t clear who got fired (it could have been the black delivery guy).
It was the store manager.
It’s also not clear why. Seems like whenever a corporation looks bad in the media they just throw a few flunkies under the bus and call it a day. Sometimes, I’ll bet the ones fired are actually the best ones to address the problem.
From the Raw Story link:
Bradley said that he was hurt by the fact that his employers just agreed to the woman’s request.
“I mean, I thought that Lowe’s would take up for me,” he said.
That’s the crux of the problem to me. If the manager had called the driver and said “we’ve got this racist wacko to deal with…how do you think we should handle it?”, I’m sure the driver (who’s black and lives in Virginia and presumably was not born under a rock) would say “I get it, someone else has got to take the package.” It’s the blind acceptance that someone can make that demand and it is simply fulfilled as if they were switching out trucks or delivery times instead of human drivers that is the real issue.
“Please don’t be in Georgia. Please don’t be in Georgia. Please don’t be in Georgia.”
Clicks link.
“Thank God. This one’s in Virginia.”
Yes. And I won’t be surprised at all if this thread nevertheless gets filled with commentary on other issues. White folks generally find it really hard to keep their eyes on this particular ball.
No one’s infringing on her right to only deal with companies that have all-white drivers.
If she can’t find such a company that’s not infringing on her rights. It’s just reality.
I have more of an issue with the fact that its always some racist WHITE person making a bullshit demand like this…It never seems to be a black person who yells that FedEx sent a white driver, or a black store owner who tells the white teenager get out of his store, or a black cop shooting an unarmed white kid who “looked suspicious”.
I am sick of us clearly having a racial divide and WHITE asshats like this get away with their bullshit. And when someone like me (a white 40-something man) calls their racists/prejudice ass out on it I get yelled at that I am disrespectful to my elders.
NO! If YOU cannot give respect to other humans, you don’t deserve respect. Now, please do the human race a huge service for once in your life and just die already,
We had appliances delivered by Lowes recently, and one of the delivery guys apologized for slipping into speaking Spanish while they were trying to maneuver up the stairs. We told him we didn’t care - speak whatever language helps you get your work done! He said that some customers had complained about it, so they were only supposed to speak English. This is in Southern CA, mind you. We have a pretty huge Spanish-speaking population, and who wouldn’t expect/accept it being spoken in a context like this?
I can see your typical suburban white Desperate Housewives type being all “I can’t believe they were speaking Mexican in my house, those filthy wetbacks. They were probably saying something disgusting about me. You know how they are.”
Yep, the same sort who refer to any male “Mexican” worker behind his back as “Pedro.”
I call everyone, regardless of races/gender/etc. Charlemagne behind their back.
But seriously, there is one and only one way to deal with this, and unlike most of my comments this is no joke. You want to be an entitled racist? Okay. Here is your refund, your kind is not welcome as a customer here.
No apologies, no anger, no arguing. Entitled racists are not allowed to be customers. And if we accidentally sold you something, refund is ready.
I get smug about Texas and Oklahoma and then some rube in my home state of Virginia does something stupid like this. SMDH!
It’s baffling because pretty much everyone who’s been in So Cal for more than a month learns some basic Spanish. It’s completely part of the culture. And yet, people will still get pissy at other people for speaking it. Conversely, I’ve occasionally had people assume that I (a very white girl) don’t understand a word of it - which is also pretty silly because nearly everyone knows a little Spanish there.
Maybe I’m just not very good at the nuances of applied racism; but wasn’t it historically the case that having black guys to carry heavy objects for you was considered a feature, not a bug?
Is there some reasonably identifiable period when confidence in the old caste system was lost and contact began to be seen as intrinsically bad, rather than only bad if it trasgressed the expected hierarchy?
Honestly, this was going to just be some snide sniping; but I’m actually rather intrigued. When and why did it come to this? The perceived failure to maintain the various Jim Crow legal and extralegal restrictions, causing a belief that the caste system was no longer tenable? The substantial devaluation of blue collar work generally with globalization and automation, leading to the position that manual labor is now a hard job to get, rather than a nigh-unlimited demand?
Since the end of legal segregation, it’s been more common for whites to seek out segregation. Once they couldn’t force black people to work for them at starvation wages, they really want nothing more to do with them. One of the ironies of integration is that in some ways, blacks and whites in the south interact less in intimate settings (in white homes). The end of legal segregation was the end of the old caste system… It seems that Tera Hunter discusses this in her book To 'Joy my Freedom (especially in the last chapter or conclusion). From slavery to now, there has actually been a slow movement away from black/white interactions in settings that put whites in firm control of the situation socially… I think Deborah White might make mention of this in her book Ar’nt I a Woman about black women in slavery…
Reality is always a mind fuck.
I think that’s a reasonable policy, when you’re with others it’s rather rude to speak in a language they don’t understand when you don’t have to. Working inside someone’s home seems like the place to be the most professional and respectful. For short term work at least; if painters, roofers, etc. are around all day, expecting them to only speak a language they’re not fluent in is not reasonable.
There’s also the practical matter of if the customer can contribute something to the discussion, e.g. “oh, you don’t want to lean on that handrail, it’s loose.”
First, I question your assertion that “nearly everyone knows a little Spanish there” but knowing a little Spanish doesn’t mean you can follow a conversation between two fluent speakers. It probably means there’s an even greater chance of misunderstanding because someone who doesn’t know the language at all isn’t going to be mistaken about what they think they heard.
This, this, this!
